1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) for generic digital content, especially relates to the protection and management of digital content independent of any data format.
2. Background of the Related Art
As various kinds of networks are widely deployed, it will be demanded that digital content can be delivered and distributed to a user, via such networks, besides using a CD or DVD. Whether or not it is secure to sell content in this way is a point of concern of the content owner.
As hard disks or other storage embedded devices become more and more prevalent, another issue is how the content protection technique can ensure the entitled rights to be exercised correctly.
As many different digital formats exist for packaging content in a digital form for easy transmitting over various network, question arises as to how protection technology can be among the different digital formats.
At the same time users have more demands for the convenience of low cost for enjoying content and sharing with their friends if they purchase such rights.
Conflict is always present since a content owner opposes illegal copying, and as a result to protect content their content using their own proprietary ways due to a lack of open protection techniques available in the market. This not only brings a big barrier for a content owner to sell content, but also brings a heavy cost for CE (consumer electronics) manufacturers to produce different versions of a product just to match with the various protection techniques used by the content provider.
MPEG-21 is trying to define a generic framework to enable transparent and augmented use of digital content across a wide range of networks and devices used by different communities. How to protect the contents when they are being used across network or devices, becomes a very important item in MPEG-21, which is the part 4 of MPEG-21, called MPEG-21 IPMP (Intellectual Property Management and Protection)
In the past, people working on a MPEG-4/2 IPMP Extension were required to define a content protection scheme based on a MPEG-4/2 system since the aim is to protect any content packaged in a MPEG-4/2 format.
In MPEG-21, a Digital Item (DI) is defined as a structured digital object for any digital content with a standard representation, identification and description, and it will be used as the fundamental unit of interchange, distribution and transaction within the MPEG-21 framework.
The Digital Item is declared and expressed using XML by Digital Item Declaration (DID). Besides a digital content which is represented as media resources in MPEG-21, such as video, music, and image, the DID provides the flexible structure to include various kinds of functional metadata. Such metadata is supposed to describe media resource format, to specify resource protection scheme, to give the resource an identification name, and to provide User preference, etc.
Besides the core part of DID technology, some other key technologies have also been elaborately developed or are under development. Digital Item Identification (DII), Digital Item Adaptation (DIA), Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP), REL (Rights Expression Language)/RDD (Rights Data Dictionary), as well as ER (Event Reporting) are all the important technologies for extensively exploiting the Digital Items' usage. All the functional metadata defined by these technologies can be placed into a DID document to aid the actual media resource consumption.
A content protection and management mechanism is highly requested to address most of the requirements raised by many different application domains, especially in the scope of MPEG-21 domain, to reflect the market needs.
The requirements on MPEG-21 IPMP are the problems to be targeted and solved here.
IPMP, especially MPEG-21 IPMP shall:
(i) support the management and protection of intellectual property in descriptors and description schemes;
(ii) provide for interoperability so that content is able to be played anywhere;
(iii) enable devices to dynamically discover, request, and obtain upgrades for supporting new media formats, IPMP tools and support;
(iv) provide mechanisms to reference Digital Item Descriptions as part of the language, make reference to external content descriptions;
(v) provide mechanisms to associate Expressions with composite Digital Items;
(vi) provide mechanisms to reference Containers or other aggregations of Digital Items;
(viii) flag that a particular Expression should be subject to protection the protection itself, if any, is provided by an IPMP system controlling the
Expression as a Digital Item;
(viii) provide mechanisms to reference authentication schemes;
(ix) provide mechanisms to ensure that the IPMP is independent of the format or delivery channel of Digital Items;
(x) unambiguously articulate requirements relating to IPMP Tool and Features; and
(xi) need to identify IPMP Tools and Features to build trusted IPMP implementations.
IPMP Tools and Features are components parts to build an IPMP-enabled Terminal or Peer. It should also possible for a Terminal or Peer to disclose its IPMP capability (IPMP Tools and Features). This makes it possible for a communicating Terminal or Peer to examine IPMP capability of another Terminal or Peer before deciding to engage with it.